For me, meditation provides the simplest, richest, and most effective window into whatever issues are most urgent and troubling in my life. It doesn’t matter what I’m struggling with — meditation almost always helps.

I’ve used meditation for:

• Dispelling fear
• Helping to decide on and maintain sleep patterns
• Contacting hidden elements of my subconscious
• Contacting spirits, guides, and even gods
• Bringing peace
• Manifesting money
• Weight loss
• Guidance on the Druid path

My goodness! I wasn’t expecting the list to be so long when I started making it.

My Experience With Meditation

And understand that this is all just since the summer of 2006. Before then, I meditated very infrequently — almost never, in fact. Don’t get me wrong: my mother introduced me to self-hypnosis around the age of nine or ten, and I used it in high school to work past my outer layers of shyness. But in college and afterwards I hardly used it, except for every simple Zen-inspired breath work occasionally to calm myself down. It just never occurred to me to use it.

Starting in the late spring of 2006, though, I suddenly found that I had a huge amount of fear that seemed to be coming out of nowhere, and I just couldn’t handle it. I struggled for months before I finally managed to bring it under control with a meditative technique I stumbled on at Steve Pavlina’s site called Go To Your Room. You can read about my further adventures with this issue here.

Kinds of meditation

I do three kinds of meditations:

• Emptiness meditations. For these, I simply practice emptying my mind of everything.
• Peace meditations. This is actually a series of three meditations done in succession that I designed for myself to break away from the fears created by my ego, infuse myself with compassion, and re-connect with the living universe.
• Visualization meditations. In these, I use vivid visualization to connect with Spirit.

I do the “emptiness” meditations whenever I do yoga, since I find it’s a great way to round out the practice. Lately I’ve been doing it once or twice a day, since I’ve started doing more yoga as part of my physical manifestation overhaul. The “peace” meditations (described in the “My Favorite Meditation” series of posts) I do just once or twice a month, since they’re a sort of last-resort method of getting myself out of a rut of depression or fear, which happens less and less frequently these days, thank the gods! The visualization meditations I do once or twice a week, whenever I feel like there’s an issue I need help with.

Troubles at First

Don’t let me give you the impression that I’ve just dropped into visualizations with no trouble at all. Oh no! While I haven’t had any trouble with the visualizing itself, I’ve had a fair bit of trouble maintaining a true connection to Spirit while doing so. What do I mean by that?

If you meditate without a “true connection”, the images you get are disconnected, and sometimes disturbing. The information you get from them doesn’t really resonate, and you feel uncertain about it. The scenes you see, and the characters you meet, seem more random, and less trustworthy. You may get the impression that someone or something is playing tricks on you, just trying to hold on to your attention.

If you meditate with a “true connection”, the images flow smoothly; they are never disturbing, although they may be odd or inexplicable; the information resonates, and you can feel — emotionally — that it is important and true. The experience leaves you with a feeling of peace and, frequently, companionship.

Getting that “true connection” was frequently hard at first. I would start down the path into the woods and find myself being stalked by some kind of beast; I’d turn to meet it, and it would bare its teeth at me, or change into a horrible image of a skull, or some other nonsense. At first I wondered what these images meant, and tried to work with them in a deep way, but I realized that the feelings I got from them were that they were trivial and not worth bothering about. They only appeared when I was feeling tired, upset, fearful, or otherwise at a “low” vibration. Some may call these evil spirits, and others may say that they are just reflections of the ego’s fears. In any case, I learned that the best thing to do with them was ignore them, and they would disappear immediately. If, for whatever reason, I simply couldn’t do that, I ended the meditation and tried again later, when I was more at peace.

This Site

My goals with this site of guided meditations is to provide assistance to those who would like to go down this path as well, by offering audio meditations and other guidance. I try to offer a new meditation every couple of weeks. The meditations are all available for a donation of any amount.

You can subscribe to this site via feed reader or email subscription. Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, questions, and any other feedback! It is all valuable and dear to me.

Thank you! And enjoy!

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